Kaitlyn Owens

Healers have the habit
of tending to leprosy
in everyone but themselves.
I don’t want to be found.
I don’t want to be saved.
I don’t want to rile up
old demons and wounds
and burn bridges before
I’ve built them.

I’ve swam deserts and wandered
until my lungs heaved heavy
from breathing heat and converting
lost footpaths into highways
for someone else to find.
I’m sore and spotted
as an uncaged ocelot,
hiding in a sullied canyon,
growling secrets to stones
older than the rings of Saturn,
asking if there are still
pristine things left to discover.

There must be.

Let’s explore the part of you
that finds a cave-in concealed from anyone
without the secret language to enter.
You can whisper open padlocks,
rummage up ruins from lost silver cities,
unearth doors boarded up from storms
long-since passed but warily remembered,
their residual terror tattooed in rust.
Speak it open in whatever way
you imagined conquistadors
before you knew better
and before you knew memory
and before you knew not every heart
ached as deeply as yours.

I can glisten good as any fool,
and I can hold onto things
heavier than you can carry.
And the soft of my mouth will leave you
bitten and unafraid, cat-eyed
and ripping open,
burlap sacks of gold coins
like a ceiling of stars finally allowed to rest
into their next bright night.

I’m not that hard to find.
Even healers need healing
sometimes.

She left me keys to a house
where no one can live.
They’re tearing it down Tuesday
and putting a vape shop in,
but today they razed the lilacs,
shore their heads like enlistees,
a violet bloodbath of petals
dying on the front lines.
Had they known how she sang
to them each morning,
a cathead biscuit tucked into
each pocket for the squirrels,
perhaps they’d understand why
I gulp gasped in the grass
of her lawn— their lawn—
as the flower clusters collapsed
and branches trapped me breathless
in a driveway I no longer knew.